Car dealerships in Scandinavia, and perhaps beyond, have something against electric vehicles. That’s the conclusion of an investigation conducted by researchers in Nordic countries, where they visited car dealerships and found agents actively discouraging buying electric cars.
To conduct the investigative study, the researchers visited 82 car dealerships in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland. In two-thirds of their visits, agents steered the researchers toward gas-powered cars, sometimes dismissing electric vehicles outright. In three-fourths of the visits, vendors didn’t even inform the researchers that they sold EVs.
Dealers act as a key type of agent known as an intermediary, they can thus exert very strong influence over what consumers think and do. The authors say that the car dealers perceived EVs as less profitable, they lacked technical knowledge and believed that EVs took longer to sell.
